The king is dead. But he can still play like one when he's motivated enough.

Maybe LeBron will wilt against the Celtics or Magic in the playoffs again next spring. Maybe his time in Miami will yield no rings. Maybe he'll retire closer to verbal sparring partner Charles Barkley than personal idol Michael Jordan on the spectrum of NBA superstars.

We can watch that play out over the next five months. But what is certain is LeBron's superlative talent, which by itself is more than enough to polish off one of the league's dregs in an early December regular season game.

National media scribes are hailing LeBron's 38-point effort in a 118-90 obliteration of the Cavs on Thursday night as a triumphant return to his old stomping grounds. LeBron gets the laurel wreath and we get painted as petty scoundrels who would dare boo such a majestic talent for having the audacity to leave our smelly burg for bigger and better things.

But LeBron's performance could have been predicted. Maybe he fed off the jeers. Maybe he was back in his comfort zone playing on the court he called home for seven years. But more likely, he was facing a team that simply didn't have the personnel to stop him.

That's the real story to come out of Thursday's game. The Heat can measure success based on the rings they win or don't win. The Cavs' forthcoming challenge is based on survival. This team is in a world of hurt, and the responsibility of yanking this franchise out of the muck will fall squarely on the shoulders of a very rich man from Livonia, Mich. who sat courtside and simmered as the Heat toyed with the Cavs.

The man is Cavs owner Dan Gilbert, now the central figure of the franchise with LeBron drinking in the vices of Miami.

Gilbert has a history of making smart business moves. He's shown an ability to get creative with developing revenue sources. But he's also a very emotional person, and he took LeBron's departure quite personally.

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The last thing that anyone needs at the moment is another screed about how LeBron James betrayed the city of Cleveland.  Pretty much every word that could be written about the personal and professional disaster that James brought upon himself this summer has been written.  And there's been plenty of words already about how Cavaliers fans acted and reacted on Thursday night when James returned to town.

But as James and his talents head back to South Beach after Thursday night's beat down, Cavaliers fans are left not just with the image of what basketball is really like in this town without James.  They're also left with the image that the team representing this city is a colossal embarrassment in more ways than any of us ever imagined.

Owner Dan Gilbert went on Twitter after the game and basically said that words couldn't express what he was feeling at the moment.  Maybe that's a sign of maturity given the words he used to express himself after James stabbed him in the back.  I was never one of those that felt Gilbert went off half-cocked on that one.  If anything, he handled it with more class than he needed to.

But this is the time that Gilbert needs to stand up once again and find the right words.  He needs to speak the truth not about James but about the inferior product he has put on the court, and I'm not just referring to the talent level, either.  What Gilbert and Cavaliers fans saw last night was a team lay down on national television and defer to James in the way that a dog defers to its master.

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Byron Scott is a three-time NBA Champion, and he’s coached in two NBA Finals. I did not make my high school basketball team. On the surface, this would appear to make me wholly unqualified to criticize the man’s performance during the Miami Heat’s 48-minute roto-rootering of the Cavaliers’ emaciated, maggot-ridden corpse last night. Then again, if we’re just talking about “performance” in the theatrical sense—the presentation, delivery, and believability of one’s words and emotions—I feel pretty confident in saying that Coach Scott’s halftime speech was severely in need of a dramatic rewrite. And I think I’ve seen Hoosiers enough times to take on the job.

In case you missed it, the real Byron Scott calmly greeted his troops at the midway point of the Heat game with a simple request. “Make ‘em feel you.” If they were going to lose, so be it. Just make them feel you. Impede their movement a bit. Occupy some of their space. Engage in some direct human interaction—a little petting perhaps. “Just make them feel you, and I’m good.”

By contrast, here is the Hollywood rewrite of Byron Scott’s halftime speech, as developed for the greenlit Universal Studios adaptation of the Heat-Cavaliers game tentatively titled “Tall Fockers,” and starring Terrance Howard as Coach Scott, Stringer Bell as He Who Shall Not Be Named, and Will Smith’s son as Boobie Gibson.

Interior: Cavalier Locker Room. Despite trailing Miami 59-40 in the most anticipated game of the year, the Cleveland players are milling about, cracking jokes, and listening to their iPods with seemingly little to no concern for the their staggeringly poor performance.

Suddenly, the locker room goes pitch black.

“What the hell? Somebody turned the lights out!” says Jawad Williams.

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Winter arrived in Northeast Ohio this week, with freezing temperatures, ice-cold winds and scads of snow in the cracks of the streets
and sidewalks.

Winter has also arrived for professional basketball in Cleveland. The difference is we have a good idea of when the climactic winter will end. The basketball winter could go on for quite a while longer.

Cavalier fans got their last bitter taste of the LeBron James era in Miami’s 118-90 rout Thursday night at the Q. We aren’t going to see TNT back in town any time soon. The brief era of Cleveland as an NBA headliner is over. It came to an emphatic end Thursday and the coffin nails were hammered deep by the man who played here for seven years and put the franchise in the limelight like no one had before- and perhaps no one will again.

Playing in front of the crowd that had once revered him and now reviled him, LeBron was wholly in his element. He had everything he needed: a reason to be motivated, an outmanned opponent and a captive audience to give a show. His magnificence Thursday was entirely predictable.

Playing just thirty minutes, LeBron poured in 38 points on 15-of-25 shooting to go with eight assists, five rebounds, a steal and a blocked shot. He didn’t commit a turnover all night and after a 5-of-13 first half he barely missed, drilling ten of his final twelve attempts from the field.

LeBron’s biggest impact came in the first and third quarters. After Cleveland built a five-point lead late in the first, the man from Akron scored eight points and assisted twice in the 14-0 Miami run that turned the game for good. He gave the Heat the lead for good at 19-17 with a breathtaking reverse lay-up to temporarily stun a Quicken Loans crowd that booed, cheered and chanted lustily long after the Cavaliers on the floor had run up the white flag.

But LeBron saved his biggest salvo for the third quarter. In twelve blazing minutes he helped turn a 19-point Miami halftime lead into a bulge that swelled to as many as 38 by displaying every weapon in his deluxe offensive arsenal. Fall-away prayers, acrobatic and-ones, long-distance bombs: they all fell for LeBron, who knocked in 10-of-12 during the quarter before exiting the game for good.

It wasn’t as if he was a man alone, either. Dwayne Wade and Chris Bosh combined for a crisp 37 points on 59 percent shooting, giving the Miami Thrice 75 points between them. And reserve James Jones, who for some reason resembles a cartoon turtle, struck off the bench for 18 points on 6-of-8 shooting, including 5-of-7 from downtown. Miami shot a blistering 56.6 percent from the field in perhaps its best team performance of the season.

The Cavaliers seemed as if they were caught off-balance by LeBron’s, and Miami’s, onslaught. They shouldn’t have been. The storm warning should have gone out long before tip-off that LeBron was going to turn this game into a statement. The potential for embarrassment was high and the Cavaliers should have recognized this. They did not. Instead of fighting and clawing and keeping themselves in the game with a chance to steal it, Cleveland simply crumbled at the first sign of trouble.

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